If your business is not changing it is probably about to die. Change is an ever-present fact of business life that can drive business value and empower teams. But not all change is created equal. There are times when the scale or the strategic importance of change will have a profound long-term impact – this is transformational change.

Transformational change can turbo charge growth, step change profitability and add significant enterprise value. This can be through transforming a business to allow it to scale, restructuring to improve efficiency, introducing new operational and IT systems or integration following an acquisition.

So if transformational change is so powerful why does it go wrong, and why is the expected value of a change often not realised? Why does this happen?

Often issues occur at the interface where change meets users, be they staff or customers. In any change there are often three primary stakeholder groups, and their motivations can be very disparate:

- Business leaders see the benefits of change and understand why it is needed. They are often impatient to get it done and realize the benefits.

- Delivery partners are focused on building out the agreed requirements on time and on budget and any diversions from this could impact their profitability.

- Those impacted by the change, be it staff or customers, often don’t share these characteristics. They just want to get on with doing a good job, or transacting, without unnecessary distractions. They may not share the vision driving the change or understand the benefits.

So inbuilt in any delivery is a tension between business leaders focussed on maximising value, delivery teams looking to reduce delivery complexity and users who just want to get on with their job. This tension can be positive, driving all parties to a result far greater than expected. It can also be destructive, and at worse can result in a programme death spiral.

There is a lot of science and process behind change programmes. It is also an art where a few often forgotten or marginalised tasks can have a huge positive impact and reduce the risk of a failure:

- Understand your organisations history of change. Learn from this and reflect on successes and failures in communications.

- Engage users early and often, particularly in requirements gathering and value mapping. Take time to understand change from their perspective and embed this in the comms.

- Articulate what you want to achieve and keep requirements focused on this. Flexibility is key as no plan survives contact with reality but ensure any tweaks and changes support the long-term goal. Build for now with scope to grow and change – i.e. future proof with flexibility, not speculative requirements. Remain clear about purpose/vision but flexible on the route.

- Keep decision lines short – this is why smaller businesses often deliver change faster and more successfully than larger ones – and keep the exec team involved and informed.

- Don’t short-cut testing and pilots. Be honest about the results and open about any issues.

- Use peer training, take time to get key users away from their day job. ‘Train the trainer’ is powerful and delivers authentic training. This will also help deliver sustainable, scalable change and leave behind a legacy of in-house expertise that can be leveraged.

- Be genuine – when things go wrong be open and honest to all parties then focus on remediation rather than recrimination.

Being mindful of these tasks, even when in the heat of delivery, will pay dividends in the long term.